I'm a huge fan of the music band Interpol.
To celebrate the release of their studio album, ELPINTOR, I created this promo video based on its cover art. It is an audiovisual experiment: I sliced and layered every element in the image and animated them independently. The final result is a 28-second video I believe it fully represents Interpol's subtlety and ambiguity.
I had lots of fun creating it and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
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Step 1: Layering
The first step was to separate each element from ELPINTOR album cover. The idea was to have a layer for each hand and also to delete the overlaying text. Adobe Photoshop's cloning tool and content-aware fill features were extremely handy for this tasks: I had to fill in the blanks left by the missing letters with skin, shadows and nails. This same logic was applied to the right hand (the one in the back): I extended the invisible areas foreseeing that any subtle movement or animation made to the left hand (the upper one) would reveal the cutout.
Original album cover:
Layering process:
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Step 2: Meshing
The .PSD file was later imported to Adobe After Effects where the -motion- magic happened. I used the puppet tool and set pins taking the joints of the hands as reference. Once these were properly located, I keyframed the animation, always looking for subtlety. My interpretation of the album cover is based on uncertainty: Are these hands begging or celebreting? Is she a ballet-dancer? Has she entered a Nirvana state or is she reaching for sky? I wanted to achieve ambiguity.
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Step 3: Syncing
Needless to say, one fundamental variable in motion graphics and animation is music. I extracted one particularly moving melody from ELPINTOR official teaser video (1:08), looped it, and used it to polish the keyframing process. According to some live performances videos found online, it belongs to the upcoming song "All the Rage Back Home".
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Step 4: Fonting
The final step was to add the text overlays.
I wanted to get the details to perfection so I vector-traced the Futuraesque font used in INTERPOL and ELPINTOR, and synced them with the percussion beats.
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THE FINAL RESULT
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Project
Interpol: Elpintor //
Personal Project
Role
Video Editor +
Motion Graphics Designer
Release Date
June, 2014